Hackathon Season
Hackathons are taking the country by storm.
For most college students, the weekends are defined by partying and homework. Every weekend for the past month, thousands of students chose instead to spend their time building things.
Why? Hackathons.
You might have heard of PennApps, MHacks, and HackMIT, the three 1000+ student mega-hackathons that highlighted the first annual Hackathon Season. In only 6 weeks, Hackathon Season brought thousands of students together from over 200 schools all across the globe to build over 1000 different hacks.
Hackathons are spreading like wildfire. Shortly after attending PennApps, several Michigan students started MHacks the following semester. With the advent of PennApps and hackNY’s interscholastic hackathon model, students are going back to their schools and starting their own hackathons — this “hackathon” culture is quickly becoming a staple among top universities.
The value prop is really clear for students:
At a hackathon you can make new friends, learn a ton, and get an awesome job offer all in the same weekend.
Student hackathons have an awesome community forming around them. Every weekend you find friends from different schools working together to build their next crazy idea. You run into each other in Ann Arbor, Philly, Boston, SF,…everywhere. Teams are constantly helping each other out, and somewhere in the room there’s at least one expert on just about anything you can think of. Not to mention you’re pulling all-nighters every weekend with many of the same people. While the hacks at a hackathon are really cool, the community you find at these hackathons is what it’s all about. I’ve met most my best friends at hackathons.
Hackathons teach many of the valuable skills schools have been struggling to successfully include in their curriculae thus far. Students who participate in these hackathons are acquiring the necessary skills to work in the exploding tech startup market. Best of all, you don’t even have to be a hacker to go to a hackathon — you go to a hackathon to become a hacker. In fact, a majority of students this hackathon season were building things for the first time and many of them weren’t even studying anything EECS-related.
Say goodbye to the career fair. Software is Eating the World and all the best companies are recruiting at hackathons. Companies recognize that hackathons have one of the best natural filters for talent — regardless of major or university, these students are spending their weekend building out their own ideas. Not only are they capable of doing so, but also ambitious enough to make it happen. Companies and VCs like A16Z, Twilio, Facebook, Google, Apple, and more are on top of their hackathon game. You might as well just take a look at the best companies to work for out of college when guessing which companies will be at a major hackathon.
Hackathons are taking the country by storm. This is just the start.
